As competition for recruiting top talent continues to grow, more organizations are investing in their employer branding strategy to fully communicate the many benefits of what their companies have to offer. However, building employer brand awareness has its challenges, one of which is in building and maintaining a talent acquisition and marketing partnership.

Many talent acquisition professionals who enlist the branding expertise of their marketing team find a willing and powerful ally, but others can also find their request for collaboration is lost in translation, where both teams are speaking in different languages. So how do you build the mindset required to establish a successful partnership with your marketing team in order to communicate a positive employer brand message?

It’s an ongoing debate, who owns the Talent Brand? Talent acquisition or marketing? Lisa kicked off the webinar by launching a poll asking attendees their thought on this frequently asked question. While 26% of attendees believed the human resources and talent acquisition department should own a company’s talent brand, a mere 10% believed marketing should be solely responsible. Nevertheless, over 60% of attendees presume human resources and marketing should team up to own their talent brand together.

Unexpectedly, Lisa threw attendees a curveball mentioning it actually doesn’t matter who owns a company’s talent brand. It could be both or neither. She goes on to say that the talent you are trying to recruit doesn’t care who owns talent brand, they care about the experience they have with your brand. However, it does take a village to develop an employer brand and two of the key members in this village are talent acquisition and marketing teams.

Lisa then dove into examples of how to achieve a successful partnership with your marketing team in order to develop an employer branding strategy that has buy-in from both teams.

1. Understand How Your Marketing Team Works

Every relationship is built on trust and understanding. Before making any requests, you first need to understand how your marketing team works and empathize with them. Marketing professionals are experts in corporate communications, developing social and event strategies, and creating brand awareness. However, note that for most marketers, developing a talent brand is often outside of their scope. On top of having limited time and resources, most marketing teams will view your initiative as an entirely new domain, and with anything unknown comes a level of anxiety and even fear.

Lisa suggests creating an empathy map where you can outline, to your best ability, a marketing person’s daily tasks, job duties, pain points, and their overall goals within the organization. Having an understanding of your marketer’s workload and state of mind will help your partnership flourish.

2. Build a Relationship Before You Need It

The second step towards achieving an effective partnership between talent acquisition and marketing is to get a jump start on your relationship, now. No need for a pressing project to prompt a connection. Lisa recommends checking their LinkedIn profile to see if you share any interests that can be used as a conversation starter. You can also invite them for coffee or lunch as a way to get to know them better, professionally and personally. If you would like to get a clearer understanding of what projects the marketing team is working on, ask if you can attend their open seminars or events. There are many opportunities to make a good first impression without waiting for the “right” project to attend, or fire to put out.

3. Never Send a Message You Wouldn’t Want to Receive

Once you are ready to request help from marketing for your employer branding initiative or strategy, make sure you communicate your message effectively. Lisa dove into a few examples of messages and subject lines to avoid when trying to connect with your marketing team.

Don’t assume your marketing contact has 15 minutes to spare.

Don’t send a message where you create an urgency where there isn’t one.

Don’t appear desperate in your outreach.

These styles of messages can give your recipient a bad impression and ultimately make them hesitant to work with you.

Data-driven headlines: “Our brand is down 20% on Glassdoor. Can we discuss?”

Compliments: “Love the INNOVATE campaign assets. Can we leverage?”

Offer to help: “Resources to help with your digital transformation strategy.”

Name drop (when necessary): “Input needed on a critical project for Angela Smith.”

Remember, never send a message that you wouldn’t want to receive. Rather, talk to your marketing team using their lingo. For example, if you are interested in “communicating your employer value proposition (EVP),” you can translate that into marketing-speak by saying, “developing a brand statement for talent.”